“What do you want?” Angel asks. “I didn’t think door-to-door evangelism was allowed in jail.”
“We’re here on official business,” Rashida says, smiling so that I can see all of her teeth which today are stained an otherworldly blue. She reaches into the cardboard box and pulls out two long cylinders, one vivid green and the other purple. “Mrs. New chose us to distribute popsicles that the food bank donated.”
“How’d you two get chosen?” Angel asks.
“Tidiest cell,” Tracy says, twitching her thick bangs from her eyes. “Something you’d obviously never win.” She glances at the balls of wadded-up notebook paper along Angel’s bed, sloppy worksheets pushing out of her binder.
“I wouldn’t take it anyway,” Angel says. “I’m immune to Mrs. New’s bribes. Minnow can have my popsicle.”
Rashida passes them through the bars and I cradle the plastic coated frozen things against my chest. Tracy and Rashida walk down the skyway, finishing their popsicle rounds.
“This should be illegal,” Angel says, arms crossed, surveying the jail.
“Why?” I ask, tearing open the top of one popsicle with my teeth.
“Every springtime this happens,” she says. “It’s either popsicles, or a makeshift water park in the yard, or picnics in the cafeteria.”
“Sounds fun,” I say, and when Angel darts me an incredulous look, ask, “Why springtime?”
“It’s statistically proven that prison riots occur more often when the weather gets warmer. The pills, the bars, and the bribes. Their proven cocktail for keeping us numbed and behaving. Bet you I can get one of the guards to cop to seeing Mrs. New bring those things in, not some food bank people.”
“Is it really springtime?” I ask.
Angel looks at me. “I think you’re missing the point.”
“I loved springtime,” I say, lying down on my bunk and chewing on the end of the lime-flavored frozen stick. “We got to change out of our blue dresses for gray ones. I could always trick myself into thinking things would be different this year.”
Angel climbs back up to her bunk, mumbling about my brain being turned like bad roast beef.
At this time of year in the mountains, there would still be snow on the ground, but there’d be a smell in the air of the world beginning to experiment with spring. I’d be marching through the snow-clogged forest to meet Jude and would be struck by the green scent of wild onion or fiddleheads. Out there, you could smell it even with three feet of snow on the ground, like the plants were asking us to wait for them—they were still there, just buried deep, just smaller than the best versions of themselves. In jail, I don’t smell anything but cleaning products and cafeteria food, but the missing Jude washes over me anyway, and I have to bite down hard to stop the tears. It’s like Angel said. The remembering never stops.
There was a time before Jude and I loved each other. A time when we were just figuring out what friendship looked like, each for the first time. It was about then that the tree house bloomed out of Jude’s mind. It was our first spring together. We met by the larch tree most afternoons, and on days I couldn’t slip away from the Community, Jude would write little notes and stick them to the bark with a tack. When I told him I couldn’t read, he drew pictures instead.
He stopped the drawings the older we got. Instead, he only wrote two words, words that I learned to sight-read even in the pitch darkness: Miss you.
On one of those early days, he walked out of the woods and pulled from the pocket of his rough, homespun trousers a yellow oblong of cake, smashed against the cellophane wrapper.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A Twinkie,” he said, a sparkle in his eyes.
“Where’d it come from?”
“Down there.” He nodded in the general direction of civilization.
“You go there?” I asked. Nobody but the Prophet was allowed to leave the Community for basic provisions. Only he was pure enough to resist the Gentiles’ temptations.
“My daddy goes sometimes in his truck to buy stuff,” Jude replied. “Tools and supplies mostly. But sometimes food.”
He thrust the Twinkie at me. The plastic wrapper made an uncomfortable squeak against my teeth as I tore it open. A blue jay appeared over Jude’s left ear, but I couldn’t say a word because the cake had just touched my tongue. My pupils must’ve dilated. My skin must’ve flushed. I don’t think I’d ever tasted something so incredible. Something so not from the forest.
“You know what?” Jude asked.
“Huh?” I replied around a mouthful.
“We should have a regular meeting place. Like a clubhouse.”
I swallowed. “What’s a clubhouse?”
“It’s like a place where you plan stuff and talk. Like from the Little Rascals.”
I shook my head, confused.
“They’re a group of kids who play and have adventures.”
“Where do they live?”
“Well, they don’t live anywhere. They’re stories from down there. You know, from TV.”